Project Space Residency

yrécha gay Jheneall (LA)

November 30 – December 28, 2027

Artist Statement

My practice is a transdisciplinary exploration of ancestry, migration, gender, and memory through my lived experience as a multi-generational Caribbean immigrant in the Gulf South. I reconceptualize the fiber drum shipping barrel as an archive and site of reclamation, carrying histories of Caribbean migration, geography, and collective consciousness. Through audio, performance, installation, photography, and film, I explore queerness, embodiment, and wata as living materials, engaging the afterlives of slavery, Maroon histories, and the continual remaking of home. Agricultural materials shape this inquiry: sugarcane traces plantation histories of extraction, while bamboo, a resilient migratory grass, becomes a carrier of movement, survival, and relation. By bringing bamboo and reclaimed barrels together as floating sonic infrastructures, I transform symbols of separation into vessels that transmit Caribbean memory, vernacular, and diasporic knowledge across waterways through vibration, sound, and embodied encounter.

Bio

yrécha gay Jheneall is a transdisciplinary artist born and raised between Kingston and Portmore, Jamaica, and based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Their practice moves between Caribbean and Gulf South landscapes, exploring ancestry, migration, gender, memory, and Afro-Caribbean movement through installation, sound, photography, sculpture, print, and film. Working with fiber drum barrels, bamboo, sugarcane, textiles, and water, Jheneall examines vernacular materials as living archives of labor, migration, and diasporic exchange. Their work has been exhibited at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, Alabama Contemporary Arts Center, NIKKI Gallery, and Uptown Laundry. They earned an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio Arts from the University of New Orleans.

Project Space Residencies are supported by The New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, The Joy of Giving Something Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and Monroe County, NY. Photography-based artists participating in the program receive support from the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation.